In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 election, there was a lot of attention focused on the role of “fake news,” but a year later, a study published in the Columbia Journalism Review told a very different story, with the blunt title, “Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media.” Instead of fake news — which was a real but relatively small problem in 2016 (all fake Russian ads… Source Source / Read More: How New York Times Fear-Mongering Helped Republicans Win the House
Mainstream Media
Mainstream Press’s Initial Coverage of Climate Bill Was a Lazy Distortion
Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson once compared the behavior of much of the national press corps to a wheeling flock of birds. Each bird follows the other birds in search of The Story, until they all move generally in the same direction. Though it tends to have a deleteriously narrowing effect on how people understand the world, the phenomenon is rarely nefarious. It’s just lazy, and more than a little chickenshit (speaking of birds): No one wants to get too far out front, no one wants to fall too far back, so everyone reports essentially the same thing,…